Day 2’s General Session began by directing the Niagara Community’s focus to the serious issue of cyber security. “Security is a journey, not a destination.” PBS NewsHour Senior Correspondent Jeffery Brown moderated a formidable team of security experts: Marty Edwards, ICS-CERT; Fred Gordy, McKenney’s; Shane Riggio, VP IT Macerich; and Kevin Staggs, CISSP, Senior Engineering Fellow, ATL, Honeywell Automation and Control. Unfortunately, our buildings and building networks are highly vulnerable — and the bad guys are getting better. Some important takeaways: Get the cyber security conversation started; make security part of the organizational and building DNA; seriously budget for security, send people to training, and then evaluate your first experience; rotate your system around and view it as an “evil bit,” and prepare your worst case scenario answers now — so, if an attack does happen, you control the message and certainly know who is responsible to respond; regulations tend to create a culture of minimum compliance; and finally, effective cyber security requires good security citizenship — awareness and and concern from everyone in the chain at every level.

Day 2’s second speaker was the amazing Don Tapscott, Thinkers50’s 4th most influential living management thinker, Co-author of both Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics, and author of the Grown Up Digital. Perhaps Tapscott’s most provocative insight was from his most recent and relative e-book entitled Radical Openness: Four Unexpected Principles for Success. We are at a turning point in history, experiencing the transformation of the physical world. So, get off the burning platform; and with great optimism, realize and accept that the future is something yet to achieve!

The 3rd presentation was by Machina Research, Global advisors on M2M, the Internet of Things, and Big Data. Machina provided the results of the Niagara Community survey and IoT market intelligence and strategic emerging market insights.